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Bahrain Race Is Not First Controversy for Formula One

Steve Crisp/ReutersRomain Grosjean of France drove during the qualifying session of the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in Sakhir on Saturday.

LONDON — The furor over the decision to run this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix has cast Formula One motor racing into a controversy that is making headlines around the world, some of them in countries where most people would scarcely know their Fangios and their Schumachers, their Nürburgrings and their Monzas, from names picked at random from a telephone directory or an atlas.

Grand prix racing has been the pinnacle of international motorsport since the first race was held in France in 1907. For those who follow the sport in its modern guise, there is something sublime about the missile-age technology of the cars, the skill and sheer courage of the drivers, the ripping-steel shriek of the 800-horsepower, 18,000 r.p.m., eight-cylinder engines, and the exotic venues, including Bahrain, the oil-rich island state in the Persian Gulf.

Names like Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentine who was world champion five times in the 1950s; Michael Schumacher, the German who repeated the feat seven times in our era; the Nürburgring track in the Eifel Mountains of Germany; and the Monza circuit, in an old Italian royal hunting park north of Milan, are cherished with a reverence that baseball fans reserve for Babe Ruth and Yankee Stadium or football lovers for Y.A. Tittle and the early 1960s New York Giants.

But with all its passion and its 200-miles-an-hour, life-on-the-edge drama, the sport has a history that has been marked with controversy. It has sometimes been over politics, as in Bahrain; sometimes over murky finances involving billions of dollars; and, more recently, over its sensitivity to ecological concerns — Formula One cars burn high-octane fuel at less than five miles to the gallon and run through enough tires in a single race to outfit several 18-wheeler trucks.

Now, the old bugaboos of politics and money have ensnared the sport in Bahrain, where protesters insist that going ahead with the race makes Formula One and everyone involved complicit in the autocracy, repression and human rights abuses of the ruling al-Khalifa family, Bahrain’s traditional monarchy. Last year, the race was canceled as Bahrain’s Shiite majority, inspired by the Arab Spring, demanded a new order that would strip away the entrenched privileges of the Sunni minority, with the Khalifa family at its head. More than 30 people have been killed in protests, one of them found dead after clashes on Saturday, and one protest leader is feared to be deathly ill on a prison hunger strike.

But Formula One, in the guise of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the sport’s governing body, made its own on-the-spot assessment in Bahrain during the winter, led by Jean Todt, a Frenchman who is the organization’s president and former head of the Ferrari grand prix team during Schumacher’s glory years. Satisfied with what it found, the organization ruled in favor of resuming the race. In the background, strong pressure in favor of racing came from Bernie Ecclestone, the Englishman who is Formula One’s commercial ringmaster, and the man who negotiated a $40-million fee from the Bahrain government.

The teams and drivers, discreetly, were much less keen, with some of the sport’s marquee names acknowledging the human rights arguments, but agreeing, in the end, to follow the lead of Mr. Todt and Mr. Ecclestone. In this, financial considerations played their part. The larger racing teams like Ferrari operate with budgets that can exceed $300 million a year. While few drivers can match the $50 million to $100 million a year that Schumacher is said to have made in his heyday, contracts that pay $15-million and more are the standard at the front end of the starting grid. A racing driver’s career can be short — tragically short, if they are unlucky — and there are few cases, if any, of a driver defying his team and refusing to race for reasons of conscience.

Those in the sport who defend the decision to race in Bahrain ask, in effect, Why pick on Formula One? Don’t other international sports — almost all of them — stick to the principle that sports and politics shouldn’t mix? Why, they ask, if human rights organizations like Amnesty International condemn Formula One for racing in Bahrain, did they not raise a similar protest last weekend, when the teams raced in Shanghai in the Chinese Grand Prix? In China, the racing teams were guests, in effect, of a ruling Communist Party which is deeply intolerant of political protest, which has tens of thousands of unfortunates in its labor camps and which, according to human rights groups, executes more people every year than any other country.

And why, for that matter, was there no wider groundswell of protest when China staged the 2008 summer Olympic Games and won worldwide admiration for the magnificence of the spectacle? And doesn’t the United States — carefully non-committal in recent days on the Grand Prix — base the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, crucial now in the nuclear confrontation with Iran, in Bahrain?

Not that grand prix racing has no skeletons in its closet. Motor racing histories record how Hitler, immediately after coming to power in 1933, selected grand prix racing, along with Olympic competition and heavyweight boxing, as showcases for German national superiority. The Nazi government gave heavy financial backing to two German grand prix teams, Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union, a forerunner of Audi, which went on to dominate racing until World War II. They developed 500-horsepower, 12-cylinder engines that were the marvel of their age, and which influenced the design of the engines that powered the Panzer tanks and the Messerschmitt fighters and the Junkers bombers that Hitler threw against his enemies.

Hitler, too, saw to the building of the fabled, 14-mile Nürburgring, which served as a test track for the German racing teams, and survives to this day, in a far safer, scaled-down version, as a venue for grand prix races. Grand prix lore has it that Hitler reacted with fury when he learned that an Englishman, Dick Seaman had won the German Grand Prix in a Mercedes-Benz run by the factory team in 1939, on the eve of war.

Seaman, who was killed in the next race in Belgium, had gone to Berlin earlier that year on his team’s orders to line up in racing overalls before Hitler at Germany’s principal motor show. After his death, his wife Erica recalled his telling her the night before, “Here I am, about to shake hands with Hitler! What I should do now is phone the Home Office” — Britain’s interior ministry — “and say, ‘If I kill him, will you give a million pounds to my widow?’ ”

After the war, when the term Formula One was adopted, grand prix racing was one of the last sports to join the sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa, staging a grand prix at the Kyalami track outside Johannesburg until 1985, long after most other sports had joined the boycott, and in a period when it was common for black protesters to face baton charges and gunshot from the apartheid police in townships only 20 minutes’ drive away from the track. The South African race resumed, briefly, in 1992 and 1993, after apartheid’s defenders had yielded and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Ultimately, the race was abandoned for financial reasons.

The move was of a piece with a broader pattern shaped by Mr. Ecclestone, the sport’s principal entrepreneur, who has moved progressively over the past decade to move races to countries like China, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi with little or no motor racing history, and scant popular support for Formula One that manifests itself in anemic crowds. To make way for these fixtures, Formula One has abandoned the races in some countries — notably, France — where the sport has a long history but less willingness on the part of their motorsport bodies and track owners to raise the exorbitant fees that governments in the new venues are prepared to pay for the veneer of respectability that comes with staging a grand prix that will be watched by perhaps 100 million television viewers.

Perhaps, in the end, grand prix racing’s image problem — and the reason it has seemed to many so out-of-touch in its decision to race in Bahrain — is that it is, by its nature, an elite sport, and carefully nurtured to remain so. In an earlier age, many of the drivers were aristocrats — Siamese princes, German barons, Belgian counts, American department store heirs, English aristocrats — who raced with ascots and bow ties, and who disported themselves with the devil-may-care attitudes of a privileged class. These were men who drove cars up the staircases of luxury hotels, quaffed magnum bottles of champagne, smoked the best Cuban cigars, and cast each other off hotel balconies into swimming pools — until, inevitably, many of them died on the track.

Today’s drivers are of a different class, many of them like Schumacher and the current world champion, the German Sebastian Vettel, the sons of modestly placed fathers who got them early into go-kart racing, and guided them as they rose the ladder to Formula One. But they, too, are cocooned by privilege, above all by the kind of wealth that runs to private jets and yachts, and by the care that the race officials, including the F.I.A., take to ensure that the media coverage is concentrated among people who do it full-time, who themselves become part of the closed Formula One circus — eager to discourse on the merits of this aerodynamic innovation or that computerized engine management system, but disinclined, in most cases, to look beyond the confines of the tracks where they spend their working lives and take the measure of the societies beyond.

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